ED's Blog by The Godfather of Biodiesel in the Northeast

In a world of ever appearing new technology the promises the world for your business, how do you decide what options justify the intense time and money investments? For us it comes down to a single two-part question, “Does this streamline our operations for our business and make our employees jobs better and more efficient?” And more importantly: “How does this enhance our customers’ experience?”

One of the technologies we’ve adapted over the past few years that delivers on both these criteria is wireless remote tank monitoring. If you’re unfamiliar, these are essentially small wireless transmitters that are installed on a fuel tank and push notifications on fuel levels periodically. The notifications go to a secure, cloud based platform.

This has been fantastic for both our dispatchers and drivers. Dispatchers are able to see levels on monitored customers’ tanks, so they are able to plan delivery routes out further and they are able to maximize delivery gallons as well (a 75% fill over a time based automatic that would typically be around 50%). This makes drivers more efficient, and delivering more gallons in less time allows us to keep costs and therefore prices down. The monitoring also helps our customer service department by reducing the number of same-day urgent run out calls.

Certain industries have wide swings in product usage depending on different factors – a particularly busy marina weekend, an unexpected snow storm for a DPW, an unusually cold weekend, or a power outage kicking on your generator… I’ve been in the dispatch and driver seat on these kind of urgent calls and its extremely stressful – I don’t doubt its infinitely more so for the customer, and for a lot of people, being remotely monitored essentially takes this entire scenario off the table. That allows you to focus on your business and your customers, rather than sticking a tank, calculating your usage, etc.

I wrote an article for Oil & Energy Magazine on wireless remote tank monitoring that gets a little more into the details, if you would like, you can read it here: Oil & Energy Magazine Online. If you’d like more info on our remote tank monitoring and other inventory controls, you can click HERE , or shoot us a comment or email.

Are any of you on remote monitoring currently? How has it helped (or not helped) your operations?